Gone Girl

David Fincher follows up his adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with another film from a pulpy, best-selling novel, Gone Girl.  But while Fincher’s cold, antiseptic, ultra-slick style seems tailor made for Gillian Flynn’s trashy psychological thriller, his usual fastidious attention to detail and realism can’t make this cynical, contrived story feel like anything more than, well, a trashy psychological thriller. I won’t go as far as to call Fincher the Adrian Lynn of the ‘10s (Lynn never made movies the caliber of Fincher’s Zodiac, The Social Network, or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), but Gone Girl certainly qualifies as the Fatal Attraction of this generation. It hits many of the same buttons, has similarly unlikable yet undeniably sympathetic lead characters, and is shot in a style that resembles an exquisite layout for an upscale real estate magazine. It will also offended feminists as much as Fatal Attraction did, and it has a ridiculous ending that plays as though it has been altered to satisfy test audiences. I’m sure these later qualities come not from studio meddling by misogynist executives, but from the author of the book herself. Flynn, a former television critic for Entertainment Weekly, seemingly thinks like a typical movie test audience and wrote her book and screenplay adaptation accordingly. 

Gone Girl tells the story of a marriage gone wrong. We follow Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a failed writer who comes home on his fifth anniversary to discover that his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has disappeared. The first part of the film ping-pongs back and forth between the police investigation, in which Nick becomes the prime suspect, and flashbacks from Amy’s point of view, as told through diary entries that flesh out their backstory. You don’t need to have read the book (as I haven't) to guess where this exposition-heavy structure is leading us, nor, for that matter, to predict most of the film’s various twists and turns. Gone Girl wants to be a deep, dark, honest exploration of marriage. But it’s the kind of movie that puts its superficial societal commentary and thematic ideas first and then tries, with limited success, to build a credible mystery story around them. Therefore it offers no actual insight into relationships or human nature. Perhaps the material works better as a novel; I can see how many of its gaps in logic would be less visible in a book written from the perspective of two unreliable narrators. I’d also venture to guess that Flynn’s book is more playfully wicked; more of a straight up entertainment than Fincher’s Oscar-baiting movie. The highbrow director wants to make Chicken Kiev out of Chicken McNuggets. 

All my negativity notwithstanding, I don’t mean to imply that Gone Girl is a bad movie. It’s just not a really good one. It is the kind of popcorn picture that will be inflated to the level of great art by both audiences and critics--it opened the prestigious New York Film Festival (where I saw it) and was lauded there as a masterwork of world cinema on par with Hitchcock’s Vertigo!  Clearly something about this picture taps into the current cultural zeitgeist, which again begs the comparison with Fatal Attraction. That film, which also explored issues of trust in marriage, was a lowbrow psycho-thriller/domestic drama that, despite not being especially deep or complex, hit all the right buttons for 1987’s movie-going public. It became that year’s highest-grossing film worldwide, scored near universal praise from critics, and racked up six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. I’m sure Gone Girl will follow a similar path. Some of the reasons for this positive response are obvious. The cast is magnificent, and Fincher’s direction is as technically precise and impressive as ever. 

Ben Affleck is as perfectly suited for the roll of Nick, as Michael Douglas was for the role of Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction. Both actors have an uncanny ability to play unlikable men that audiences still root for. Like Douglas, Affleck is a rare actor who is somehow able to use the very qualities that make him a movie star to create average guys that audiences instantly identify with. Rosamund Pike is no Glenn Close, but the inability to make Amy a totally believable character lies more in the writing than in her performance. Where as Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction comes across as a well-researched case-study of an obsessive, unstable, bipolar individual who tries to manipulate her way into the heart of the man she wants, Amy is an exaggerated creature entirely manufactured by a pulp writer who wants to manipulate her audience. It’s macabre fun to imagine that there really are people like Amy in the world, but it’s much scarier to realize how many people like Alex actually are among us.

The supporting cast of Gone Girl is so impressive that they infuse the movie with much of the credence its screenplay lacks. Neil Patrick Harris, as an ex-boyfriend of Amy's, and Tyler Perry, as Nick’s high-profile lawyer, are both solid. But the rest of the supporting players, who bring powerful acting chops rather than star-power to their roles, really ground the film and make it work.  Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Steppenwolf Theatre’s 2013 production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) brings emotional authenticity to the role of Nick’s twin sister. Her scenes with Affleck are flawless, even though these actors don’t bear even the faintest resemblance to each other.  Kim Dickens (House of Sand and Fog, The Blind Side, and HBO’s Deadwood) and Patrick Fugit (the kid from Almost Famous) play the detectives heading up the police investigation into Amy's disappearance. Their smart-cop/lazy-cop banter is so well written and performed it makes you smile through every scene in which they appear. Even though we’ve seen this type of relationship in literally hundreds of previous crime movies and TV procedurals, they make it fresh. Their characters also connect Gone Girl to an older era of filmmaking where storytellers were less concerned with realism and more interested in spinning a good yarn—which helps counter the rest of the picture’s gravely serious approach. These and literally every other pairing of actor to part, no matter how small the role, represents the kind of sharp casting Fincher is known for. It’s the main reason his Netflix series House of Cards works as well as it does. When these actors are placed in the hands of such a gifted cinematic craftsman—Fincher always knows exactly where to put his camera to cover any given scene in a way that will achieve the maximum impact for its intended effect—you can’t help but get swept up in the film, no matter how hollow it is.